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The Arctic and Geopolitics

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Abstract

The Arctic is completely uninteresting geopolitically from a traditional security perspective, and while it is interesting from a nontraditional security perspective, it is truly important only in the one respect that just so happens to attract the least attention and action from policymakers.‌ Moreover, it is the one respect that forces us to look in the other direction.‌ Security is not at stake in any meaningful sense in the Arctic, but is very much at stake because of it.‌

An earlier version of this chapter appeared in Kimie Hara and Ken Coates, eds., East Asia-Arctic Relations: Boundary, Security, and International Politics (Waterloo, ON: Centre for International Governance Innovation [CIGI], 2014). I am grateful to CIGI for permission to republish an updated version, and also to Eva Buzsa, Ken Coates, Aileen Espíritu, Douglas Goold, Kimie Hara, Scott Harrison, Carin Holroyd, Thomas Homer-Dixon, Akihiro Iwashita, Whitney Lackenbauer, Keun-Gwan Lee, James Manicom, Gerald McBeath, Manjana Milkoreit, Fujio Onishi, Kai Sun, and Tamara Troyakova for their helpful comments and suggestions.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    The one partial exception is Denmark, whose territory, if one includes Greenland, is predominantly above the Arctic Circle, but whose population is almost entirely below it.

  2. 2.

    Arguably, even during the Cold War the Arctic had relatively little “hard” security value, owing to the fact that neither superpower harbored intentions of nuclear attack. The dangers of nuclear war were almost entirely a function of accident, inadvertence, misperception, and unintended escalation—any of which would have resulted in massive casualties south of (not north of) the Arctic Circle regardless of early warning capabilities.

  3. 3.

    A security community is a group of states in whose relations the threat or use of force plays no role whatsoever.

  4. 4.

    Notably, all of the countries involved in actual or potential maritime jurisdiction disputes in the Arctic are either signatories to the U.N. Convention on the Law of the Sea or are tacitly observing its provisions, which include various provisions for the peaceful settlement of disputes.

  5. 5.

    The three countries that took up human security most energetically in their foreign policy platforms were Canada, Japan, and Norway. Prime Minister Stephen Harper of Canada distanced his government from human security because it was so closely identified with the previous Liberal government, and in particular with former Liberal Foreign Affairs Minister Lloyd Axworthy.

  6. 6.

    The historical record thus far clearly indicates that the Northern Sea Route is more hospitable to shipping than the Northwest Passage.

  7. 7.

    The major exception to this is the Atlantic Conveyor, which transfers heat from the Gulf of Mexico to Northern Europe via the Gulf Stream—the mechanism that keeps Murmansk ice-free year-round at the moment. This “heat pump” may be vulnerable to fresh-water hosing caused by glacial melting, particularly in Greenland—although relevant models are uncertain.

  8. 8.

    The term “environmental security” results in more than 1.2 million hits on Google; the term “ecospheric security” results in 79, many of which are my own.

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  1. University of Waterloo, Waterloo, ON, Canada

    David A. Welch

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  1. Johnson-Shoyama Graduate School of Public Policy, University of Saskatchewan, Saskatoon, SK, Canada

    Ken S. Coates

  2. Department of Political Studies, University of Saskatchewan, Saskatoon, SK, Canada

    Carin Holroyd

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Welch, D.A. (2020). The Arctic and Geopolitics. In: Coates, K.S., Holroyd, C. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Arctic Policy and Politics. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-20557-7_29

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